And here is the first Action 53 volume with multiple CNROM entries. The 13 entries comprise 17 32K PRG ROM banks and 26 8K CHR ROM banks, and there isn't nearly as much unused space within each PRG ROM bank as there had been in the past. This means it actually has to allocate new banks just for CHR ROM.

Now I need the following:

Any category 2 entries fit to include

Bug testing

Improvements to descriptions if necessary

A 64x56-pixel screenshot for each activity, cut down to four grays plus two groups of 3 colors (one group per 8x8 pixels). This is a lot more color detail than was possible in the first three volumes.

Ok here's my idea for a non-contest entry for the multicart.
A music player that plays music/sfx from all the games on the cart.

I figure that UI and functionality to this will be done before March, and will probably take at most 8KiB of ROM.
The most difficult part of this idea is finding and keeping track of subroutine locations in all the entries.
Namely I need to find subroutines of initialization (easy to find from RST), tick (easy to find from NMI), song_change (hard), sfx_play (hardest).
I also need to figure out how to tap into the directory structure of the menu to figure out what registers to set whenever I swap into the game banks.

In anycase I will be content if my plan falls completely apart. I'll post a new thread on this when I get a proof of concept working.

Nova is SNROM for the same reason as Kid Icarus, Metroid, and the early prototypes of Super Mario Bros. 2: it needs more than 2K of RAM accessible outside the vertical blanking period. The programmer is willing to port it to UNROM with a WRAM decoded by the equivalent of a 7420, as in Family BASIC, but I thought we were leaving out WRAM for cost reasons.

Nova the Squirrel isn't done yet either. I'm hoping that it's good enough to include on the final 53 game cart (and justify extra RAM) when that's released, where it could be the "Cheetahmen" of the compilation sort of.

For volume four I think it could be fitting to fix up Quadruple Action Blaster Guys a bit? Maybe add some actual story sequence and an actual ending to properly tie it into being a prequel to Nova the Squirrel? That game's just a plain 32KB NROM so it should be fine.

could be fixed simply by using the other gray, they look almost identical in the palette i use. or obviously i could check to make sure the value is never $0D before writing to palette. either should be easy.

Forgive me if it's been addressed before, but is there any chance of having some flash memory available for games to use?

If it were, progress could be saved in a lot of the games (if the developer desired). Gruniozerca would benefit pretty greatly from it. (We'd track individual collection of carrots and allow re-entry into stages.) I think it'd take maybe 4 bytes. Miedow could benefit a lot from it as well.

The A53 menu could even save last played game and start there on bootup.

It could also be neat to have the ability to manage the save data through the A53 menu as well, something like the PS1 memory card access, where each game's saved data could be cleared individually.